Types of Maintenance in Production and Operation Management

The design life of most equipment requires periodic maintenance. Belts need adjustment, alignment needs to be maintained, proper lubrication on rotating equipment is required, and so on. In some cases, certain components need replacement, e.g, a wheel bearing on a motor vehicle, to ensure the main piece of equipment (in this case a car) last for its design life. Different approaches have been developed to know how maintenance can be performed to ensure equipment reaches or exceeds its design life. In addition to waiting for a piece of equipment to fail (reactive maintenance) the other approaches are preventive maintenance, predictive maintenance, or reliability centered maintenance.

1. Breakdown (Reactive) Maintenance

Breakdown maintenance is basically the ‘run it till it breaks’ maintenance mode. No actions or efforts are taken to maintain the equipment as the designer originally intended to ensure design life is reached. Studies as recent indicate that, this is still the predominant mode of maintenance.

Advantages to breakdown maintenance can be viewed as a double-edged sword. If we are dealing with new equipment, we can expect minimal incidents of failure. If our maintenance program is purely reactive, we will not expend manpower or incur capital cost until something breaks. Since we do not see any associated maintenance cost, we could view this period as saving money. In reality, during the time we believe we are saving maintenance and capital cost, we are really spending more money than we would have under a different maintenance approach. We are spending more money associated with capital cost because, while waiting for the equipment to break, we are shortening the life of the equipment resulting in more frequent replacement. We may incur cost upon failure of the primary device associated with its failure causing the failure of a secondary device. This is an increased cost we would not have experienced if our maintenance program was more proactive.

Our labour cost associated with repair will probably be higher than normal because the failure will most likely require more extensive repairs than would have been required if the piece of equipment had not been run to failure. Chances are the piece of equipment will fail during off hours or close to the end of the normal workday. If it is a critical piece of equipment that needs to be back on-line quickly, we will have to pay maintenance overtime cost. Since we expect to run equipment to failure, we will require a large material inventory of repair parts. This is a cost we could minimize under a different maintenance strategy.

Advantages

1. Involves low cost investment for maintenance.
2. Less staff is required.

Disadvantages

1. Increased cost due to unplanned downtime of equipment.
2. Increased labour cost, especially if overtime is needed.
3. Cost involved with repair or replacement of equipment.
4. Possible secondary equipment or process damage from equipment failure.
5. Inefficient use of staff resources.

2. Preventive Maintenance

Preventive maintenance can be defined as, “Actions performed on a time or machine-run-based schedule that detect, preclude, or mitigate degradation of a component or system with the aim of sustaining or extending its useful life through controlling degradation to an acceptable level.” Preventive maintenance is a means to increase the reliability of their equipment. By simply expending the necessary resources to conduct maintenance activities intended by the equipment designer, equipment life is extended and its reliability is increased. In addition to an increase in reliability, lot of amount will be saved over that of a program just using reactive maintenance. Studies indicate that this savings can amount to as much as 12% to 18% on the average.

Advantages

1. Cost effective in many capital intensive processes.
2. Flexibility allows for the adjustment of maintenance periodicity.
3. Increased component life cycle.
4. Energy savings.
5. Reduced equipment or process failure.
6. Estimated 12% to 18% cost savings over reactive maintenance program.

Disadvantages

1. Catastrophic failures still likely to occur.
2. Labour intensive.
3. Includes performance of unneeded maintenance.
4. Potential for incidental damage to components in conducting unneeded maintenance.

Depending on the facilities current maintenance practices, present equipment reliability, and facility downtime, there is little doubt that many facilities purely reliant on reactive maintenance could save much more than 18% by instituting a proper preventive maintenance program.

While preventive maintenance is not the optimum maintenance program, it does have several advantages over that of a purely reactive program. By performing the preventive maintenance

as the equipment designer envisioned, we will extend the life of the equipment closer to design. This translates into dollar savings. Preventive maintenance (lubrication, filter change, etc.) will generally run the equipment more efficiently resulting in dollar savings. While we will not prevent equipment catastrophic failures, we will decrease the number of failures. Minimizing failures translate into maintenance and capital cost savings.

3. Predictive Maintenance

Predictive maintenance can be defined as “Measurements that detect the onset of a degradation mechanism, thereby allowing causal stressors to be eliminated or controlled prior to any significant deterioration in the component physical state. Results indicate current and future functional capability”.

Basically, predictive maintenance differs from preventive maintenance by basing maintenance need on the actual condition of the machine rather than on some preset schedule. Preventive maintenance is time-based. Activities such as changing lubricant are based on time, like calendar time or equipment run time. For example, most people change the oil in their vehicles every 3,000 to 5,000 miles travelled. This is effectively basing the oil change needs on equipment run time. No concern is given to the actual condition and performance capability of the oil. It is changed because it is time. This methodology would be analogous to a preventive maintenance task. If, on the other hand, the operator of the car discounted the vehicle run time and had the oil analyzed at some periodicity to determine its actual condition and lubrication properties, he may be able to extend the oil change until the vehicle had travelled 10,000 miles. This is the fundamental difference between predictive maintenance and preventive maintenance, whereby predictive maintenance is used to define needed maintenance task based on quantified material/equipment condition.

There are many advantages of predictive maintenance. A well-orchestrated predictive maintenance program will eliminate catastrophic equipment failures. Schedule of maintenance activities can be made to minimize or delete overtime cost. It is possible to minimize inventory and order parts, as required, well ahead of time to support the downstream maintenance needs and optimize the operation of the equipment, saving energy cost and increasing plant reliability. Past studies have estimated that a properly functioning predictive maintenance program can provide a savings of 8% to 12% over a program utilizing preventive maintenance alone. Depending on a facility’s reliance on reactive maintenance and material condition, it could easily recognize savings opportunities exceeding 30% to 40%. Independent surveys indicate the following industrial average savings resultant from initiation of a functional predictive maintenance program:

1. Return on investment—10 times
2. Reduction in maintenance costs—25% to 30%
3. Elimination of breakdowns—70% to 75%
4. Reduction in downtime—35% to 45%
5. Increase in production—20% to 25%.

Advantages

1. Increased component operational life/availability.
2. Allows for pre-emptive corrective actions.
3. Decrease in equipment or process downtime.
4. Decrease in costs for parts and labour.
5. Better product quality.
6. Improved worker and environmental safety.
7. Improved worker moral.
8. Energy savings.
9. Estimated 8% to 12% cost savings over preventive maintenance program.

Disadvantages

1. Increased investment in diagnostic equipment.
2. Increased investment in staff training.
3. Savings potential not readily seen by management.

Concept of Reliability in Maintenance

Reliability is the probability of survival under a given operating environment. For example, the time between consecutive failures of a refrigerator where continuous working is required is a measure of its reliability. If this time is more, the product is said to have high reliability.

In a textile mill, generally the light is maintained at a minimum specified level. To achieve this, let us assume that there are 100 bulbs in use and the guaranteed life time of these bulbs is 5000 hours. If we collect statistics about the number of bulbs survived till 5000 hours, we can compute the reliability of the bulbs. In this case,

If the number of bulbs survived till 5000 hours is 80, then we can say that the reliability is 8 (i.e, 80/100)

The reliability of railway signalling system, aircraft, and power plant are some of the interesting examples for demonstrating the reliability concept. In these cases, a failure will lead to heavy penalty.

The concept of reliability can be matched with systems concept. Generally, products/equipments will have many components which may function with serial relationship or parallel relationship. So, the individual component’s reliability affects the reliability of the product. Hence, enough attention must be given at the design, stage such that the product’s reliability is maximized. The cost of maintenance is also to be considered along with the reliability while improving it.

The general failure pattern of any product is given in Fig. 8.1. This is called bath-tub curve. In Fig. 8.1, there will be large number of failures in the early period. This is mainly due to non­alignment while shipping the product, or misfit while manufacturing (assembling), or very high initial friction between moving parts, etc.

Reliability Improvement

The reliability of a system/product depends on many factors. So, we should concentrate at the grassroot level to improve product’s reliability.

Some of the ways of improving systems reliability are listed below:

• Improved design of components
• Simplification of product structure
• Usage of better production equipments
• Better quality standards
• Better testing standards
• Sufficient number of standby units
• Usage of preventive maintenance if necessary at appropriate time.

Source: KumarAnil, Suresh N. (2009), Production and operations management, New Age International Pvt Ltd; 2nd Ed. edition.